It's all in Interest Rate Expectations

I am referring to the gold price in the above title. By that I mean, whatever market participants think as to when the Fed is going to make the first move higher, will determine whither gold goes. You tell me what interest rates will be in June, and I will tell you whether gold will be higher or lower. It really is that simple.

Take a look at the following chart. It is a 30 minute line chart in which I have removed all the markings. The two graphs shown are two totally different and separate markets. You tell me what is what?

Give up? Try looking at the same chart now with the annotations.

 

Amazing isn’t it? Gold continues to track the movements in the Ten Year Treasury note futures remarkably closely. When it goes up ( interest rates move lower) gold moves up with it. When it goes down (interest rates rise) gold goes down with it.

Notice, there is no “gold price manipulation” crap. No wild conspiracy theories; no “evil bullion bank cartel actively slamming the gold price lower”. No, it is a simple matter of what the market thinks about where interest rates are going and when.

This is why all the wild claims about gold going to the moon, doubling in value, soaring to $2000, blah, blah and more blah are the fruit of empty-headed drivellers who cannot keep their tongues from parading through the earth and defiling us all with their baseless and meritless predictions.

No one knows what interest rates are going to do right now. They are pretty much convinced that the Fed is going to hike at some point but they simply do not know when. For that matter, neither does the Fed itself, based off of what I am understanding of Ms. Yellen’s testimony and her answers in front of the Congress today. How in the hell then can anyone with a functioning conscience have the temerity to be making claims about where the gold price is going and even more hubristically, what it will actually be in a few weeks to a month or more? Do they have some special esoteric insight into the mind of Janet Yellen and the current FOMC that even those people who sit on that Committee do not possess about themselves? Of course not!

Normally I try to restrain myself from expressing my complete and utter disgust at these pestilential gold hucksters and their wild and bizarre claims but there are days, such as today, when I really have had enough of these predators and the trail of wrecked financial lives they leave in their wake.

The best we can do as mere mortals is to try to stay on our toes and constantly assess and reassess what market sentiment is from day to day. Given the state of things and the rather fickle nature of today’s modern markets, that is proving to be a task that requires an almost permanent seat in front of a computer all day long, day in and day out ( you would be amazed at how much extra time you have in a single day once you give up doing those annoying things like eating and sleeping!)

Just like the Fed itself, based right off of the words that came out of Janet Yellen’s mouth this morning, that means we have to sit and look at each piece of economic data and attempt to determine what it is telling us about the state of the US economy.

I can only tell you one thing with certainty – price movements  in gold and many other key markets that will be directly impacted by any Fed decision to hike rates or not to hike rates are going to remain incredibly volatile. Until we see a clear, unambiguous trend for the economy, one way or the other, we are going to experience days in which prices will fly or will drop with a startling rapidity as the computers react to each and every bit of data coming out.

As long as the economic data is mixed and inconclusive, we are going to see uncertainty and uncertainty ALWAYS means choppy and unpredictable markets. Just remember that the next time some pestilential gold guru opens his mouth and confidently asserts that he alone knows where gold is going and when.

Announcement

NOVEMBER 20-2016

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT - ALL OF TRADER DAN'S WORK CAN NOW BE FOUND AT HIS OFFICIAL WEBSITE WWW.TRADERDAN.NET

 PLEASE NOTE: BELOW WAS THE ORIGINAL NOTE ANNOUNCING THE TRADERDAN.COM SITE TO THE PUBLIC. I NO LONGER HAVE ANY CONNECTION TO THAT SITE.

 To the readers of the site;

Thank you for your continued viewership of this site. I encourage those who have not already done so, to give the new site a try ( www.traderdan.com).

I also want to let you know that effective as of the end of this month of February, I have made a decision to no longer allow posting/comments on the site.

The reason is two-fold - first, by allowing the comments, I am forced to fend off the constant spammers from India which is tiresome.

Two - since I am only infrequently posting articles up here, the sheer depth of the comment strings is becoming rather unwieldy due to the small number of articles that I post here.

Thanks again.
Trader Dan

Safe Haven buying supporting gold today

 
This has been the pattern since August of last year and with just a few exceptions, gold has been moving in sync with 10 year Treasury note futures.

Remember, a rising Treasury market means FALLING YIELDS.

As money rushes into bonds to park it while waiting out the uncertainty which is negatively impacting the equity markets, yields will move inversely. AS a matter of fact, the yield on the 10 year is currently sitting at 1.664%. It is set to close out the month not that far above the all time LOW yield near 1.50% ( remember this is a monthly closing yield and does not take into account intramonth spikes.

As long as this continues to be the case - falling yields resulting in safe haven trades - gold will find support - however, it is going to take some sort of catalyst to kick it sharply higher as there is still a very large contingent out there who view this period of falling rates as temporary while they wait for the stimulative impact of lower energy prices, ( and lower food prices) to make themselves felt in the second half of this year.

Swiss National Bank signaling ECB Bond buying coming

This article is posted at my main site:

IN a surprisingly unexpected move, the Swiss National Bank threw in the towel on their Franc/Euro peg and threatened to move interest rates deeper into negative territory and announced a scrapping of the floor at 1.200.

The result - ABSOLUTE CHAOS across the currency markets, the oil markets and the gold markets.The result? The cross plummeted an astonishing 1400 points in the matter of 30 few minutes! Every single trader on the planet who was in that cross and expecting them to defend that floor that they have been so vocal about defending, within that brief time span, was financially obliterated.
This is what I HATE ABOUT CENTRAL BANKS - as I have said many times in the past, it is my personal opinion formed from years of trading and, I might add, from having been on the receiving end of something along this nature from the Bank of Japan at one time, Central Banks are the CHIEF CAUSE of MARKET VOLATILITY and instead of helping to create/maintain relatively calm and orderly markets, they inject disorder, chaos and devastation.

I just hope some of my readers were not trading that cross.

My take on this surprise is this - there was no reason for the SNB to do such a thing UNLESS they knew that a big bond buying program was coming from the ECB next week. Even though their interest rates were already negative, they were spending enormous amounts of their reserves in maintaining that 1.2000 peg. If the ECB were to go ahead on the bond buying/QE, the Euro would weaken ( at least that is what the market is expecting it to do and thus the reason for the strong downtrend in the common currency). A weaker Euro would exert even more pressure on the Euro/Swissie cross requiring even more ammunition to be wasted by the SNB.

Thus they threw in the towel and surrendered.

Gold certainly does like this!

The oil markets have gone beserk as a result as well.

Large Speculators returning to Gold - but with this Caveat

Here is the latest chart detailing the relationship between the Hedge funds NET POSITIONING in the Comex gold market and the price of the actual metal.

I have presented this chart for some time now over at my former website to rebut the silliness from the gold perma-bull camp that any moves lower in the price of gold are ALWAYS the result of "evil bullion banks working to suppress the price of the metal to discredit it". That mindset had a place at one time - back when the US Dollar was sinking - but is now passé and an extreme waste of precious mental effort and time. The camp that has this as a central tenet of their "faith" has long ago lost any credibility on this issue among serious-minded investors/traders.

Gold has been sinking in price because speculators were simply not interested in it when better returns on precious capital could be obtained elsewhere (in equities in particular). An ultra-low interest rate environment here in the US, with no signs whatsoever of any inflationary pressure, in which global commodity prices were sinking lower while the US Dollar was moving higher was simply one in which it did not favor any serious appreciation in the price of the yellow metal. There was nothing the least bit "conspiratorial" therefore about a falling gold price, an asset which throws of no yield or dividend whatsoever and requires storage fees, insurance, etc. when holding it in any size. In other words, it COSTS to store gold when such money could be better put to work producing actual returns in equities.

Now that there are some concerns about global growth and equities are looking a bit wobbly, gold is getting a bit of a look from some speculators who are cautious at the moment. This can be seen in the return of some hedge funds to the long side of the gold market at the Comex ( although I should note that the gold ETF, GLD, continues to display an amazing lack of interest on the part of big Western-based institutional buyers ).

The blue line shows the NET POSITIONING of the hedge fund community. The Red line shows the gold price. As you can see, as the NET LONG Position has increased, so has the gold price. The two track each other EXACTLY.

Something I do want to note however that really stands out for me when I see this chart and analyze it in detail.

Beginning in 2013, while the relationship between the gold price and the net positioning of the hedge fund community remained intact, something happened. Can you see it?

From that point forward, the build in NET LONG positions by the Hedge funds HAS NOT resulted in successively higher gold prices. The opposite is the case. In other words, it is taking more and more buying by Hedge funds to move the price of gold higher but the end result is that the gold price is at lower levels than such levels of net longs would have taken it in the past.

For instance, look at this week's net long level by the hedge funds. It is currently a bit over 106,000 futures and options combined. A similar level of hedge fund exposure to the gold market back in January 2013 had gold sitting above $1650!

How to explain this ? Simple - While hedge funds have been recently expressing an interest in playing gold from the long side over the Comex, there remains a correspondingly increasing amount of WILLING SELLERS of the metal. To see gold sitting closer to $1200 than it is to $1700 when the net long positions of the hedge fund are at the same level as they were TWO YEARS ago tells me that a very large number of players in gold do not expect high prices in gold to last.

This does not mean gold cannot and will not experience rallies. It is now currently in the midst of one which it taking it up to test resistance between the $1220-$1230 level. It might even be able to take that out and put in a test of $1250. But one does wonder how much buying it is going to take on the part of the hedge funds to really push this market to the point where it actually can do something the least bit exciting; not with this many willing sellers of the metal around.

Here is an intermediate term view of the metal (weekly chart). It has been able to keep aloft above the key $1180 level but thus far has not managed to even make it to the first level of chart resistance noted. Not especially impressive when viewed from this angle is it?

As noted many times when discussing the prospects of this metal - just because a market has found a bottom does not mean it is about to embark on a wildly bullish tear higher. It can meander sideways in a broad trading range for YEARS. Until I see some signs of serious life in this market, I am simply not interested in it other than for short term trading purposes only.

To the readers of this site and especially to those who continue to post here at the forum - please note that I have set in place a process that requires all posts to be reviewed prior to being posted. This is not so much an attempt at censorship as it is an effort to prevent the pestilential spammers from India which for some reason believe that they can use this website as a place to secure free advertising for their crap services. Those who do so, without at least having the common decency, moral integrity and professionalism to obtain my permission or even pay a small fee, deserve the scorn and contempt in which I hold these parasites.

Thanks for your understanding with this. In the meantime, I would urge my loyal readers here and regular posters to come on over to the new site and give it a go. You are missing out on a great deal of commentary and hopefully valuable insight into what is taking place in the markets and more importantly, the WHY behind the moves in price.

Also, it would be fun to have some of you long time posters contributing to any discussions at the new site as some of your contributions in the past have been very thought provoking and interesting.

 

For this Year's Christmas List

It's really too bad that we all are just now learning about this. All I can say is; "Santa - PLEASE, PLEASE, remember me because I have been really good".
This is the Ultimate Chocolate Lover's Dream come true - a printer that prints chocolate candies!

http://www.companyspotlight.com/news/the-hershey-co/14411/776693

Also, to my TraderDan.com readers - over the weekend we made the transition at the site to a dedicated server. Apparently there are still some issues with the move that are causing problems for some of you wishing to log in and read the commentary and analysis that I am posting there.

If you are a TraderDan.com member and are having problem logging in, please let me know here and I will forward your email onto the site administrator for help.

I apologize for this inconvenience and assure you we are doing our best to get it cleaned up as quickly as possible.